


Don't Forget What You See

by Grey_Amethyst



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Abusive Parents, Character Study, Coming of Age, F/F, Femslash February, First Love, Queer Themes, Racism, Underage Substance Use
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-15
Updated: 2018-03-15
Packaged: 2019-03-31 13:22:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13976007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Grey_Amethyst/pseuds/Grey_Amethyst
Summary: Victoria Chase considers the quiet compliance that bleeds into her green contacts and flared dresses less of an identity crisis and more of a tool to survival. She thinks she knows who and what she is behind those blurred labels until Rachel Amber wipes the glass clean and leaves her to fill it in again.





	Don't Forget What You See

**Author's Note:**

> I arrive, much too late for Femslash February, with a half-empty bottle of sparkling water in one hand and this story in the other, to throw the first part of this fic limply into the void.
> 
> The idea for this fic came to me after the first preview of Before the Storm’s gameplay came out, and I took the pieces from Before the Storm I liked and threw away a decent amount of characterization (and therefore plot) I heavily disagreed with. I didn’t really have following base game canon strictly in mind either, but unless something seems unintentionally odd (I always thought Victoria was born in Seattle but lived in Portland until recently, for example, and I decided to keep that original perception for my own characterization of her) that shouldn’t be too apparent.
> 
> Not all content warnings have been listed. 

**I**

**·**

Victoria is fifteen when she goes to the salon, hair past her shoulders but too short to make any reasonable ponytail out of, and sees a lady with a pixie cut at the counter. It’s not the first time she finds her gaze lingering on a woman – not even the first time envy and desire tangle up and pull low in gut – but she feels different, seeing this woman with her black hair short and pale neck exposed. There’s a tattoo of a snowflake on her shoulder using negative space. She’s got a red and purple ombre lip and an all-black outfit on. Her false lashes are feathery, fluttering against her strong cheekbones.

Victoria, waiting in line behind her, tries coming up with something to say, but she never does, and the woman leaves the counter with her keys in one hand and phone against her pierced ear.

Her stylist asks, “The usual, Victoria?” and after the chair spins she sees in her reflection a girl who has found a new layer to the truth she has known all along.

Most of her classmates just stare at her, don’t bother commenting, although she hears one or two whispers about her being a lesbian, a butch. Victoria orders keyhole blouses and tight pants and flared skirts and compacts herself in them with soft blush and nude lips. A girl her parents find easier to show investors. A girl who doesn’t borrow her best friend’s button-downs and suit jackets when she needs to find living in her skin a little more bearable for an interview or audition.

When she comes back from the winter break, she goes to Nathan first, because she needs to show him what she can’t tell him, but when she asks if she looks like a dyke something confused and hurt passes across his gaze before he goes blank, something between _my sister’s gay and she never let me use that word_ and _why the hell would you call yourself something like that_ and it angers and disappoints her so quietly she can almost tell herself she’s fine when he just says “You’re still pretty.”

At a Vortex Club meeting, Rachel Amber sits next to her with her white skin and heavy eyeliner and stupid feather earring. She says, “You look like a fucking boss,” with a grin at Victoria’s bangs, the hair she didn’t have the courage to ask her stylist to cut short around her ears.

And it shouldn’t have an effect on her, but something burns deep inside her as she twists her mouth in an arrogant little smile.

**·**

The Vortex Club never gets boring, really, it’s just a matter of finding who and what to watch.

Nathan’s a spectacle when he’s high, and Victoria wishes weed was the only thing he’d ever be on, because the most anyone gets from him then are passionate arguments about strange and mundane things. Tonight, it’s theories about the ending of Lost, and Victoria sits with Taylor at the far corner of the pool where only some of Nathan’s shouts are intelligible.

“I want a tattoo.”

Taylor raises her eyebrows the way she does when she’s pretending she’s not that interested. “Are you serious?” Then, “What kind?” and “Where?” fast enough that Victoria can feel her thoughts flicker like a camera shutter.

“God, Taylor, I’m just _thinking_ about it.”

“Oh. Okay,” with her smile, curious but inoffensive. Taylor’s not the type to pry, but she’s nosier than either Hayden or Nathan, which Victoria appreciates in the instances that she can’t bring up what she really needs to talk about.

Victoria almost feels bad. She’s not even sure why she mentioned it. She’s been thinking of those things on and off, always on the body or face of another faceless girl before herself. Piercings all over the ears, a single ring on the side of the lower lip. Jewelry like iron knuckles, blue lipstick or black eyeshadow like what Victoria sees when she’s driving in Portland at night.

“I never told you how cool your hair is,” Taylor says at her reflection in the pool. They get ripples here, but most of the action is by the VIP section, which is limited to the upperclassmen members; Victoria is as annoyed as her classmates, but a big part of her is glad that she doesn’t have to been in a closed space with the seniors who ply open Rachel Amber with drinks and empty promises.

At least, that’s what she’s heard.

“Thanks,” Victoria says, but her thoughts are elsewhere, and she doesn’t have the mind to examine that faint smile Taylor gives her.

Auditions for The Tempest are next week. Victoria asked Nathan, offhand, if he wanted to audition with her, a joke already at her lips for when he said no, but he shrugged and said he’ll dare Hayden to join them if Victoria gets Taylor. Their chemistry will work in her favor, she thinks, even though Taylor said she hates public speaking and Victoria has her own doubts about both boys.

She’ll make it, though. She has to, and she has to do it over Rachel Amber.

She almost, _almost_ feels her lungs seize up at the idea of losing the part, her heart thrum into a wobble, but Nathan calls out her name and effortlessly recovers from a stumble as she turns and stands to greet him.

“Victoria. Victoria.” He blinks slowly, holding his eyes closed for a little longer than Victoria can pretend she doesn’t notice. Hayden and his football teammates, Zachary and Logan, are behind him in different states of annoyance. Then, “It’s chill if Lost ends with everyone being in fucking purgatory ‘cause they all died in the crash, right?”

“What the fuck? No. That’s fucking bullshit.”

“ _What_ did I tell you _?_ ” Nathan shouts at Zachary.

“Well that’s because she doesn’t watch anything!”

Taylor whistles. “Oh, Zachary.”

Nathan and Victoria rip into him.

**·**

Kris, Nathan’s sister, is stuck the aftermath of a blizzard in Boston. Victoria smiles at the sliver of her face in the message she got from her, skin pink from the cold and blue eyes narrowed. She’s caught between two mounds of snow that are taller than her.

She can’t ever hate Kris, even if she can tell Nathan still resents her for leaving. Even if sometimes she resents Kris for forcing Nathan to find someone safe in her wake, making them closer for better or worse.

Victoria wonders, sometimes, between watching Kris post about her girlfriend and internships and college orgs, if this is how Nathan always felt.

She wonders, sometimes, between watching Nathan rock with tremors and openly take his prescriptions in homeroom, if this is how Kris always felt.

But Kris is across the country and there’s no use missing her when she never wanted to be in Oregon in the first place.

It’s then, four days before the audition with her back against the communal kitchen’s wall, that Rachel pauses on her way to the common room and looks at her.

Victoria senses her more than she sees her. She locks her phone, replacing Kris’s face with her own bare-faced reflection, and catches Rachel’s warm gaze. Something about her smile makes Victoria lower her phone, angle herself away from the pot of water she has that isn’t boiling yet, and feign confusion. “Oh, hi Rachel. It’s weird to see you in our dorms at night. Usually you’re stumbling in just before the sun goes up.”

Rachel giggles. Victoria blinks and barely avoids squinting to see if she’s on some substance that even Hayden won’t touch.

Insulting Rachel is more habit among Victoria and every other girl she talks to at this point, not something she does intentionally but not at all reluctantly either. Rachel’s not an easy target for when Victoria feels useless or like a total fake or when she seems to both take up too much space and not exist at all for the sole fact that insults graze past her as easily as she draws admiration from total strangers.

“Just passing by. Hey, you haven’t worked on the history essay yet, have you?”

“I’m researching,” Victoria says, because she doesn’t want Rachel thinking she’s pathetic or something, writing half an essay the week it’s assigned when her mind is on a dozen different tracks at once and she can’t sleep but is completely exhausted.

“You’re always right on the game, Victoria,” Rachel says. She’s smiling, all pretty and open and fake. Victoria smiles back automatically, imagining grabbing the corner of her bare lip and pulling. If only Rachel had a piercing there for her to rip out.

“Just like you, huh? Except,” with a cruel little smile, “I don’t take any Adderall, you know?”

And Rachel laughs, like it’s funny.

The pot of water is bubbling. Victoria turns to lower the heat and peels open her dry noodle packet. It’s easier to hide the downward pull of her lips that way.

“So you’re auditioning for the play in a few days.”

“Yes,” Victoria says icily.

“I’m surprised you got Nathan to join in.”

This time, a grin spreads, unbidden, across her face. Practicing lines in his room reminds her of being at the manor with him and Kris. She remembers laughing but not what they laughed about, the same way she remembers tensing up when Nathan’s dad called him into another room and not understanding why Kris didn’t. That was all so long ago. Back then, Victoria didn’t understand why her step-mom didn’t want her going to the prestiged girl’s high school a town over.

“Why haven’t you guys joined the drama club before?”

Victoria rolls her shoulders, then shrugs. “No reason,” she lies.

“Sweet. Well, I’m really looking forward to what you’re trying out.”                

“Nice,” Victoria says.

Rachel Amber, at the very least, knows a dismissal when she hears one.

**·**

After the audition, Victoria stands with Nathan across from Blackwell’s academic building with shaking hands, going through cigarette after cigarette. She wants to get drunk, or high, or ask Nathan for some of the harder shit he buys off the seniors. She wants to crawl into her bed and forget that she was on stage and she forgot the lines to a fucking _monologue_.

Nathan’s going slower than her. He offers all but three cigs from his second carton and she pockets them without thanking him, still dangling one between her lips. He’s shaking, but she can’t tell if that’s because of his evening meds or because he’s still shaken by so many people staring at him. She knows how embarrassed he gets after an outburst in class, unlike anyone who tries to say things about him. Unlike even their teachers, probably. 

She stomps out this last one and promises herself she won’t continue when she gets back to the dorm. Taylor, half-hearted as her audition was, will try to make it easy for her.

Nathan, silent, rubs across his forehead, glancing down the road. The buses have stopped running by now. It’s a Wednesday and she knows she shouldn’t sit in his passenger seat as they drive in long circles around Arcadia Bay like they have on so many late afternoons like this one, but if she asks he won’t say no.

“Whose car is that?”

A navy-blue Corvette is pulling up to the front of the school, hazard lights on since that lane’s supposed to be for buses. The man in the front seat reminds Victoria of Nathan’s dad, who she makes an effort to avoid after the summer before Blackwell when she saw Nathan with a reddening bruise dribbling blood all down his face. The man here is also graying, but his hair is black and his face is thinner, chin shadowed a little too darkly to look clean-shaven.

Students like Victoria and Nathan don’t gawk at nice cars, but they recognize an important person when they see one. It’s only when she catches someone hurrying down the steps, canvas bag swinging about her hips and blue feather earring fluttering against his cheek, that Victoria realizes.

“Here I thought Rachel Amber was one-hundred percent trailer trash,” Victoria muses.

“Her dad’s, like, an attorney, I think.”

She tries not to frown. Nathan never latches onto the whole _Rachel Amber is a trashy slut_ brigade, although he’d never ask her to stop. Sometimes she worries that he’s looking at Rachel and thinking about doing something that’ll get him hurt.

Victoria knows Nathan. The angriest she’s even been with Taylor was when she called Nathan clingy, but Victoria _knows_ him, knows the only affection he’s ever received is conditional on how people wanted him to be – less twitchy, less nervous, less _sick_.

She wonders if he ever thinks she’s lucky, having had, even just for a little while, a parent who loved her. She doesn’t know. She never talks about that kind of thing with Nathan, and he never brings it up.

Across the street, opening her dad’s car, Rachel glances up across the hood to see them. She lifts up one arm in a wave, face glowing, and calls out, “I loved your audition!”

As the car peels away, Victoria mutters _bitch_ so softly that Nathan just barely keeps himself from twitching his head aside.

**·**

The first time Victoria ever slaps a guy, pains shoots down her wrist so fast that for a second she worries that she managed to sprain it somehow, but not a single part of her regrets it.

He’s one of the seniors on varsity football with a standard name like Josh or Jon or Joe. He sidles up to her and Taylor, and Victoria don’t shoo him away because she isn’t sure if he’s talking to her or Taylor, and both of them are smart enough not to take drinks from guys anyway. After minutes of tuning out his drawling nonsense, Victoria accidentally catches his stare. He looks her up and down and says, “Has anyone ever told you you look exotic?” The next part, the part she lets him say before her hand lashes out as if controlled by her thoughts alone, starts with, “You know, with those sexy slanted eyes—”

His head snaps back just a bit. It makes a good sound. Loud enough that about half the VIP section goes quiet.

Red is draining in the corners of Victoria’s vision. She shakes her hand out.

Josh or Jon or Joe blinks stupidly at her for a second before his face contorts, uglier. Taylor moves but the guy is faster. He knocks Taylor aside as he grabs at Victoria’s arm, and it’s so weird that in that initial jolt of fear her instinct to cry out for Nathan, only recently a bit taller than most of the girls in the Vortex Club.

She’s thinking about that when liquor splashes in front of her. The guy cries out, takes his hand away to clutch at his eyes, and Victoria looks to her side, half-expecting to see Nathan swinging fists at the guy.

Rachel Amber looks back at her with urgent eyes and grabs her wrist. “Come on,” she says, not shouting, and that’s all Victoria needs.

They run from the VIP section like there’s a blaze at their feet. Victoria’s ballet flats somehow stay on, but one of Rachel’s Chucks comes flying off and Victoria’s laughing before Rachel is. There’s a stitch in her side and her mouth and lips are dry. She only lets herself slow down when they reach the front steps of the underclassman dorms, and Rachel comes to a stop at the doors as Victoria lingers by the railing at the top of the hill, breathing in sharply.

She presses her mouth closed and forces herself to inhale evenly as her throat burns. Rachel is breathing hard too, sweat dribbling down her temples, her neck. Her overdone eyeliner is smudged in the corners, the wing on her right disrupted. Victoria sees the fibers of her blue earring sticking to her face and wonders how it never frays or stains.

Rachel catches her stare. She bursts into giggles, and Victoria follows, dabbing gingerly at the moisture she can feel building on her cheeks.

“I seriously thought you were going to kick that guy’s ass!”

Victoria grins. “It’s times like these that I regret keeping my nails short.”

They both laugh at that, breathless. Rachel reaches up to remove the elastic that has fallen down her now low-hanging ponytail. She brushes the tangles out with her fingers as Victoria makes her way up the steps. For once she’s glad she blistered her feet on heels during the audition. “What’d he do?”

“Asshole called me _exotic_.”

“No!”

“I shit you not,” Victoria says.

People have called her that before, mostly people working with her parents. She has had stakeholders and investors look between her and her parents and mention, almost casually, how generous it is to adopt internationally.

And the worst part is that her parents didn’t correct them.

…Damn, one of her contacts is rolling out of place.

She’s trying to ease it back when Rachel says, “I’m sorry you have to put up with people saying shit like that.”

“It’s part of the package,” Victoria says absently. “I get my mom’s looks and the creepy comments that come with it.”

“Your mom?”

Victoria takes her finger from her eyelid and _looks_ at Rachel. Her face is unassuming, lips parted, eyes soft.

Victoria doesn’t keep what happened to her a mom a secret, so she always assumed it just…spread around, the same way she dimly knows that that weird loner girl with the wannabe butch getup is also a member of the dead parent club. A car crash, supposedly, and when Victoria heard about that she asked herself once, and only once, if she’d prefer that to a year of hospital visits.

“My mom was Filipina,” Victoria says. She goes for the back pocket of her capris, where her phone, ID, and keys still are. “ _Was_ as in she’s dead, by the way, she didn’t just magically come from a different country all of a sudden.”

Rachel gives her that quintessential sympathetic stare. Everyone does.

Victoria swipes her card and opens the main door, holding it open as she enters.

“Thanks,” Rachel says. As they go up the stair well to their floor, she says, “I didn’t know you were Filipina.”

“Half,” Victoria replies. “My dad’s the reason why contest judges saw _Victoria Maribeth Chase_ , looked at me, and acted surprised back before I dyed my hair and wore contacts.”

She tugs the corners of her lips up at Rachel, expecting for more confusion bordering on dismissal. But Rachel Amber nods at her, close-mouthed.

“…I know you can’t really get it, but, like, you know. It’s just life.”

The space between Rachel’s neat eyebrows creases. She glances down for just a second, and when she looks up again her face is bright again. “Let me make this up to you.”

“Make what up?”

“Making you run in leather flats.” Patent leather Prada scrunch flats, more specifically, but Victoria can respect a girl who knows her shoes. “I’ve got a stash in my room.”

Victoria raises her eyebrows. “With what?”

“Enough for a bowl or two.”

She considers refusing, just on principle, but there are only so many ways Victoria can thank someone who threw a drink at a sleazeball for her when that someone is Rachel Amber.

**·**

Sometime after the forth shot, Victoria starts forgetting why she steers clear of Rachel during parties. They’re sitting on Rachel’s bed, tucked in the corner near the window with a bookcase separating them from the other bed, passing the bong between hits, and as the alcohol bleeds warmth in her torso Victoria finds herself lingering on the soft glow that illuminates Rachel’s face. She’s got the lights out, only blue Christmas lights on, which is so _predictable_ and yet peaks the languid calmness that leaks into her limbs.

“Don’t you have a roommate?”

“You mean Dana?” Rachel gives her a _what do you think she’s doing on a Vortex Club night?_ look, and Victoria laughs, snooty and exaggerated the way that unfailingly makes Nathan do that cackle thing he’s so embarrassed by.

“She’s okay with these lights?”

“Blue is a relaxant. And we can, like, change the brightness of them too and how many are on.”

“No shit. Really?”

Rachel gives her a wild grin. She goes for the remote, a nondescript thing the size of maybe two lighters side-by-side, and starts pressing buttons. She turns half the lights off, then dims the room. The bong becomes a sleepy orange haze in the dark.

“Hey zombie girl,” Victoria says, pushing at Rachel playfully.

Rachel laughs before she takes a long hit. She puts a few more lights on, but not as many as earlier. “I love the color blue,” she hums, arching her long back in a stretch.

Victoria watches her ribs pull forward underneath her shirt. “Winter baby?”

“No, I wish! I’m a Leo.”

“Me too.”

Rachel’s eyes glint. “That must be why we’ve never hung out. Blackwell isn’t ready for two unstoppable forces.”

“Okay, relax,” Victoria says. She reaches for the pipe. Her hand grazes Rachel’s on the way. “We never hung out because you’re on your own planet, making friends with all the wallflowers and maxing your social links. No need to add your west coast magic to it.”

“Is that really what you think?” Rachel says, half-laughing.

A slow, drunken smile spreads across Victoria’s face. She shakes her hair back and closes her eyes, breathing in those fumes she hates whenever she’s not high. Rachel’s smiles are always so patient. It maddens her. “I think you can’t be as perfect as people say you are.”

“People don’t say that about me,” Rachel says, somber for once. She gestures beyond Victoria, whose thoughts are a little to blurry to understand. “Excuse me, sorry,” Rachel says as she reaches across her for the liquor bottle at her bedside table. Victoria’s reflex is to move back, but it’s muted. Rachel’s body is warm against her. Her arm brushes against Victoria’s breast.

“Most people do,” Victoria tells her, humor lost in her voice.

Rachel holds her gaze for a long moment, face unreadable. She finally glances away and pulls straight from the bottle. Her face twists up as her throat rolls. “…What do you think?”

Victoria thought she just told her. She licks her lips, measuring her words, and Rachel’s stare flickers downward. “Most people are out for themselves. No one ever comes into someone’s life just wanting to…fucking make things easier if improving their own shitty life isn’t part of the package.”

“I don’t think so,” Rachel says. “You’re not like that.”

Victoria laughs. Honestly laughs, because it’s funny to her, the idea of Victoria Chase ever being selfless. She takes the bottle from Rachel, going so far as to detach her hand from it. She takes several short gulps and winces as she slots the bottle between her thighs so her hands are free to hold the edge of the mattress, and she leans back, looking at the ceiling, the lights aligned like constellations. “I’m getting alcohol out of being with you.”

This time Rachel leans back. Her torso is long, but her shirt rides up like that. Her stomach is tan. Victoria sees a few stretch marks across her belly and feels a slow flood of relief; Victoria has them on the insides and peaks of her thighs. If all those guys don’t mind them on Rachel, maybe Victoria has a chance of finding a girlfriend who’s fine with hers. “Somehow I doubt it’s a rare commodity for you.”

“Pfft. Duh.”

“When’s the first time you drank?”

Victoria, her peripheral vision gone blurry, doesn’t bother looking away as she considers. “I was fourteen, I think. …No, thirteen. Nathan’s sister was supposed to be watching us.” It had to have been thirteen, because Kris left for Boston not to long before her birthday.

“So you were with Nathan?”

“Yeah.”

“What happened?”

Victoria chuckles, sounding darker than she intends. “We weren’t fucking if that’s what you’re asking.” Rachel’s even stare tells her it wasn’t. “I went to his place, and Kris—his sister—left to chill with her girlfriend. We broke into his mom’s wine cabinet. Nathan just started drinking maybe a few weeks ago, so neither of us really knew what we were doing. I remember we were in the living room—what passes as a living room in a fucking mansion—and we watched a bootleg of Wicked on the flatscreen and sang along, just, like, being stupid.”

Rachel’s face brightens as speaks. When she’s done Rachel nudges her, eyes narrow with how wide her mouth is pulled. “I knew it! I knew you two were theatre geeks!”

“Ugh, _whatever_.” Victoria takes another drink to hide her own smile, dim and a little careless. “We didn’t audition to watch Glee with all you nerds.” Victoria streams it by herself with her headphones on. Nathan watches every now and then but always ends up checking his phone during the songs.

“That’s a shame. You kind of remind of Quinn.” And there’s that smile.

In spite of everything, Victoria finds herself grinning back. It helps that Dianna Agron can pull off looks from the powerfully feminine to sexy and androgynous. When her character comes on screen Victoria gets that simultaneous desire to both be her and be with her, something that’s getting more common when she sees a beautiful woman spilling over with confidence. “Does that make you Rachel Berry?” she asks, teasing, and Rachel beams.

“That’s for me to find out,” she whispers, pressing her shoulder, the entire side of her body against Victoria with a playful shimmy that goes languid just as Victoria sucks in a breath.

The tips of her eyelashes are lost to the blue lights around them. Victoria watches her gaze trail down to linger on her mouth. Rachel’s lips are parted, and Victoria leans in to meet her halfway.

Rachel’s mouth is sticky, tasting bitterly of booze and pot, but her lips are a sweet kind of tart. Rachel exhales against her, reaches for her thigh so she can turn toward her, slots her bottom lip between Victoria’s, and Victoria _moans_ , bringing up her free hand to meet Rachel’s shoulder, her jaw, sucking lightly at her soft bottom lip, pecking the glossy top, and then Rachel holds the liquor bottle aside so she can roll her body _on_ Victoria.

Victoria’s entire body thrums with warm electricity. She has seen kisses like this, in person, in movies, on videos she can only watch with her hands over her burning face and her laptop muted. Rachel presses her mouth to hers like she doesn’t know she is the first. Her knees are bent on either side of Victoria’s left leg, back arched, and Victoria can feel the warm of her torso, the shape of her bra—

Rachel leans down, further, kisses the underside of Victoria’s jaw, and Victoria shuffles upward, _away_.

Fuck, how did she end up _laying down_?

…The muscles of her inner thighs are shaking.

“Hey,” Rachel says, softly. She moves and sits up as Victoria stands, straightening her blouse. She’s still got the neck of the liquor bottle clenched in her hand. It sloshed over at some point, leaving her fingers shiny, and Victoria averts her gaze. “…Sorry, I—”

“I, um…” Victoria takes a shuddering breath. Everything is hazy and blue. She reaches up to tap her fingers against her lips. It takes a second to remember she wore liquid lipstick, and she can’t feel whether it’s intact.

“Sorry,” Rachel says. Victoria turns her head to see her worrying at her feather earring. “I didn’t… You’re really drunk, I shouldn’t’ve—”

“No, just…” Victoria swallows on a dry throat. Rachel looks up at her, lips shining. “…I kind of want to do that again.”

Rachel stares, gaze flickering, searching. Then, she places the liquor bottle on the fridge and smiles.

**·**

They don’t do anything else besides kissing. And moving their hands up each other’s shirts once. Or twice. Mostly because Victoria ducks her head down on Rachel to kiss her neck, then realizes how warm and soft Rachel’s legs are on either side of her and that even if she’s skinny her body is still pretty cozy and she may have dozed off for a few minutes with her nose in her collar before Rachel realized and woke her up, giggling.

Victoria staggers a little as Rachel helps her back to her room. The halls are empty and vividly warm-toned. Rachel asks for her phone at the door and types a number in before helping her into bed, where she seems to fall asleep before she hits the mattress.

In the morning, after she downs a bottle of water, groans at how the cold makes her head throb worse, then forces down a few ibuprofen that Taylor must’ve set out for her before going out to visit her dad like she does every weekend, she is able to have a proper freak-out.

It’s not quite over kissing a girl, not in the way she expects, because Victoria always expected the first kiss of her life to be with a woman, but never her first kiss being drunk and high and with Rachel fucking Amber.

She’s glad, for once, that she has mostly skipped the whose gay crisis stage, or perhaps forgotten it altogether, because that is not something she would be able to deal with on top of this.

Victoria has always known she was gay; she attributes that to her mom her patiently explaining what Victoria didn’t understand about the queer folk who worked with her at the salon. And she knows her dad and step-mom might think less of her for it. Anne pitched enough of a fit when she cut her hair above the shoulder. Maybe she should be glad that her parents aren’t like Nathan and Kris’s, since they’d probably outright judge her for it rather than make her feel like she can earn back their affection by being less obvious—although her dad and Anne bait her more with respect than love.

Her head is still dull and aching, but she rolls herself out of bed and starts shuffling off her clothes. No way is she being seen in yesterday’s clothes, even if it’s on the way to the showers. She stuffs her slightly damp panties at the bottom of her laundry basket, face burning. Then she tosses on sweatpants and a hoodie and makes the plodding walk of shame first to the bathroom, then to a shower that should’ve been taken last night.

The showerhead beats down on her for what feels like hours. She keeps looking down at her body, the slope of her breasts, her legs, prickly after missing shaving yesterday. And she keeps thinking about Rachel Amber’s body, the firm press of her bra against her chest, her long, smooth legs, the loose, soft skin at her belly.

Her face burns, because it’s _stupid_ , she didn’t even see under her bra, anyway, and there are plenty of girls at this school who are prettier than Rachel Amber. That girl who’s always in the library, Stella Hill, has a nice face, even if she has maybe four shirts and two pairs of jeans total, and Dana Ward’s got that tall cheerleader build, even if she insists on dating the ugliest guys at school, and that senior Steph Gingrich had those nice lips and hair even if she is so removed from normal living that she runs the Dungeon and Dragons club.

Fucking Kelly Davis, a year ahead of her, has the most gorgeous makeup on day after day, even if she’s somehow skinner than either Taylor or Nathan.

Victoria crushes her nylon loofah and sighs. That thought is enough to cut off the warmth building down below. Not that she’d ever stoop to touching herself in a shower cubical.

So maybe Rachel Amber does set something alight in her. Maybe there was a spark when their bodies pressed together and they shared the same breath.

Maybe Victoria wants to do that again.

She dries herself off, dresses in her sweats again, and heads back to her room. She notices her phone on her bed and kicks of her shower sandals, diving right back onto her mattress, wet hair and all. In the Vortex Club first years’ group chat, Rachel has messaged everyone saying that she brought Victoria to her room and she’s fine. Victoria has individual messages from Nathan, Taylor, and Hayden anyway, and even a few of the older girls who noticed the whole exchange.

She scrolls through her messages and feels a faint smile pull at her lips. Nathan messaged her not too long ago, asking if she’s still hungover like him because he can order something. She thumbs in a response and keeps her head up. Like usual, the little icon showing he’s typing comes up almost immediately.

One thing she unfailingly likes about Nathan, something she doesn’t let herself think about too much or she’ll feel completely awful, is that he’d rather everyone hate him than one person finding him weak, but when it comes to her he doesn’t make much of an effort to hide that enthusiasm that used to come with his sister’s gentle encouragement, but colored with something different when it comes to her, loyal and nervous.

He has to know she’s gay, she tells herself. She lumbers to his room, and he’s got a couple of rumpled menus spread over his desk. He looks up at her before she even closes the door, and he gives her that boyish, almost shy look that Victoria always associates with him even when he’s so hard to reach a part of her can’t recognize him at all. She grins back at him, presses the door shut, and knows she doesn’t have to tell him, because he has to know already.

**·**

She thinks about it, after. It comes and goes in embers flitting about her thighs pressing together in just the right way, her fingers brushing the surface of her pushup bras, the smell of strawberries and booze. Victoria keeps remembering the feeling of lips against her own, between her teeth, at the slope of her neck, and she keeps thinking about that, not even related to Rachel, just a girl with full lips that Victoria can lean over and taste and feel smiling against her.

Otherwise, Victoria doesn’t feel much beyond that initial wave until the Saturday when audition results are posted.

Behind the underclassmen dorms, she goes through half a pack before the burn in her face is overwhelmed by bitterness lumping in her saliva and she had to double over, swallowing fast as a sour taste rises from her unsteady gut. She wants to lock herself in her room and rip apart the photos she’s been preparing to submit to contests. She wants to get rid of any proof that shows she’s a total reject before it happens.

At least she didn’t tell her parents she auditioned. Now she doesn’t have to explain that she’s a fucking understudy.

She starts assignments that aren’t due for another month, leaves an essay due next behind to do it, at one point starts browsing on the internet with shrill noise at the back of her head telling her she should be doing something productive, not wasting her time on nothing, but everything is white static and she can’t let herself cry today because it’s not worth it, definitely not worth it and how will she react when it’s something that actually matters?

The sky has gone the color of grapefruit outside when she comes to herself.

Her head is thick with exhaustion but wired with the restlessness that comes with a night without sleep. Victoria prefers the slogging days when she can barely work up the energy to go to class over this. She goes to her fridge and knocks some of Taylor’s Diet Coke aside to grab her sparkling water; she downs an entire bottle in one go. The raspberry flavor sticks like bile to her tongue.

All she can really do is listen to her body when she gets like this, and now her legs are asking her to go outside, and her fingers are begging to wrap around her car’s wheel. Curfew is in an hour but she tosses her door open.

And in the hallway, near the door that leads to the stairwell, is Rachel Amber. Rachel Amber and her strawberry blonde hair and pale skin and heart-shaped mouth and richly blue eyes.

Rachel Amber, with pupils blown wide and cheekbones rubbed red, keys at her feet as her back slumps against her door, staring down at her phone like it’s got her terminal diagnosis.

She doesn’t look at Victoria until their shadows bleed together. The whites of her eyes are stained pink. Victoria smells pot and the hot, salty air of recent sobs.

“Come on,” Victoria says. She gestures as she goes for the stairwell door. “Bring your keys.”

She only looks back when she’s got the door propped against her back. Rachel looks at her, eyes shiny, mouth unsteady at one corner.

“Not gonna wait all day.”

Rachel offers a shallow, shaky grin.

**·**

“My dad’s not going to be able to make it to the play,” Rachel says just as the sea breeze makes goosebumps over Victoria’s arms. She’s got her caramel macchiato between her thighs. Her berry nail polish is chipping at the sides, hands resting on the stone barrier between the asphalt and sandy beach they’re sitting on.

Victoria almost says that her parents were never going to come in the first place. That they’ve just started planning a showing, and she knows that if she tells them that she is an understudy – and they’d never ask in the first place– they’ll say that it’s not worth going if she’s not a lead.

She doesn’t, because she has the feeling that this is just one part Rachel is telling her, and she’s not cruel enough to put Rachel down to accuse her of boasting her effortless accomplishment.

“Business travel?”

“A case,” Rachel says with a huff. “As if he hasn’t had tons of those already. God. It’s like one day, months from now, is just too much.”

Victoria stirs her straw about her iced green tea latte. “Yeah.” She pauses, presses her lips into a line. “I get that from mine, too.”

“I know I shouldn’t still be this upset because it happens _so much_ , but…” Rachel sighs and lowers her gaze. “…Do you think that’s pathetic?”

“What is?”

“Waiting for someone to change when you know they won’t.”

Victoria thinks of Nathan, building himself around his dad and his sister and her, wearing that shy smile that makes him look so young. “No,” she says, because pathetic isn’t Nathan wanting desperately for someone he relies on to care about him enough to stay. Pathetic is Victoria being too selfish to tell him that she can’t love him the way she thinks he’s waiting for, the way he’ll never admit to until she brings it up.

And she won’t. Ever.

“…Do you think I would know?”

“You’re the only person I can trust to give me a straight answer.”

She scoffs, straw still in her mouth. The ice rolls in her cup. “Well that’s about the only straight thing you can expect from me.”

And now Rachel looks at her. There’s a line between her eyebrows. She’s not wearing makeup, Victoria notices as she catches the faint sun spots over the bridge of her nose, not dark enough to be freckles. “So…are you bi or—”

“I’m gay. A lesbian, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“…I don’t know, like…” Victoria flicks at the cap of her cup. She thinks of celebrities, of woman she fawned over back in her mom’s salon. “When I think lesbians, I think, like…badass women. They’re just…effortlessly cool and attractive and people like them.”

“You’re pretty badass already. And people like you, Victoria. Because you’re honest.”

“Yeah, honestly bitchy.” She smiles tightly at Rachel but can’t help but warm to that giggle Rachel tries to cover, and all at once her racing mind leaves room for her exhaustion to hit her. 

“Tired?”

“Yeah. Fuck, for no good reason either.” She shifts on the barrier. Her heels dig into the loose sand. A cool, damp breeze drifts by, bringing with it the thick smell of the ocean. Victoria tilts her head back, wanting to close her eyes and try calling back those sparse memories of summers in the Philippines that have mostly left by now when she realizes. “Since when were the clouds that dark?”

Rachel follows her gaze. “Uh, just now? But my weather app said it wasn’t going to rain today.”

A drop lands right in the corner of Victoria’s eye. She has just enough time to blink it out and turn her body to Rachel so her glare leaks into every movement when the drizzle starts.

They’re up and ready to run in seconds. Victoria’s shoe slips in the sand and Rachel catches her by the elbow, and Victoria pushes her by the small of her back so she doesn’t stop completely. They’re in full sprint mode by the time Victoria’s car is in vision; Victoria has her keys in her hand already but lightning flashes across the sky just outside the driver’s door and she drops them. Swearing, she fishes her key out of a rapidly pooling puddle, rips the door open, throws herself inside, and stabs the key in the ignition.

Victoria bundles her wet shirt onto her lap, presses her thighs together so closely that the drips of water pool there. She shakes her bangs out of her face, looks over, and sees Rachel looking at her incredulously, hair in soaked locks.

And they burst out giggling. It takes Victoria a few attempts to get her engine going. “I can’t believe that happened,” she says, as she pulls out of her parking spot. “Everyone at the dorm is going to be so fucking confused.”

“We’re going back to the dorms?”

“Uh, yeah?” Victoria is almost surprised by the befuddled look on Rachel’s face.

“I mean, like, we’re going to run all the way uphill from the parking lot, after curfew, and, like, hang our clothes to dry or something?”

Victoria halts at the stop sign right at the border of the parking lot and pulls her bottom lip into her mouth. They’ll have to dodge security, not to mention all the rumors that’ll pop up. Running off from a party after backhanding a guy is less…questionable.

A dim part of her remembers that this is how Kris got outed to her parents, being reported after sneaking out with a girl at night. Victoria knows how the rest of that story goes.

“My parents have a condo. I mean, we have a house in Portland near the gallery, usually they’re there, like tonight, but…Anne said kids grow up safer in the suburbs, so…” She reaches to increase the wiper speed, but the fastest setting still has water gushing down the windshield. “…Um, you can…like, come over and I can, you know, give you a change of clothes before I drop you off—off at your place, or whatever.”

She doesn’t look over, but she can hear the smile in Rachel’s voice when she answers, “Okay.”

**·**

They’re dripping all the way from the garage to the elevator to the carpeted halls that lead there. Inside, Victoria takes off her shoes and kicks them under the radiator. She goes to her room, stepping around the rugs and furniture, unlocks her bedroom door and pushes it open for Rachel.

“Hey, this looks familiar,” Rachel says, pointing at the poster on the inside of her door. Victoria watches her eyes follow the brush strokes. “I swear I’ve at least heard of this musical. Did you, like, cut off the title?”

“I did,” Victoria answers, voice clipped. Rachel, to her credit, doesn’t push. She’s always telling herself she needs to throw that thing out. Maybe now she has to.

She closes the door behind them, heads into her connected bathroom and starts pulling clean towels from the cabinets. Rachel takes one with a nod of thanks and goes for the bathroom too; Victoria stares, confused, until Rachel leans over the sink and wrings her hair out.

Victoria shucks off her blouse, squeezes the padding of her bra so the worst of the soakage dribbles down her chest, and wraps a towel around her upper body, hanging just low enough that she can roll off her leggings without everything showing. A second of hesitation, then she uses her other towel to wipe every bare piece of skin down, shivering. Her body, still damp, feels sheathed with a film that she can’t wipe off, like she has emerged from a pool or seawater and is just now unpruned.

She’s thinking about how she can take a shower without making Rachel feel unwelcome when Rachel asks, “Hey, can you pass me another—?”

“Yeah,” Victoria says, scrambling for the least wet one she has allowed to topple to her floor, and “yeah, sure—” becomes this choked, breathy kind of exhale when she turns, finds Rachel close enough that Victoria can take the swell of her hip in her free hand if she wanted to. She’s got on something thin and lacy below the waist and Victoria knows she can’t keep looking, so she slaps the towel over Rachel’s wrist, reaching for her – must’ve thought Victoria wouldn’t turn around, _fuck_ – and faces the wall again, willing herself not to be so aware of her bra, a cup size up to make up for its padding, and her panties, with their thick, ugly elastic band.

She’s breathing too hard. Her arms are already dry but she’s scrubbing at them still.

“Hey.”

Victoria tests the word in her throat first, feigns a cough, and calls back, “Yeah?”

“I…really appreciate you taking me out.”

“It’s not much. A drive-through Starbucks may be the pinnacle of Arcadia Bay’s civilization, but I doubt that—Rachel, it’s not that funny.” But she has a nice laugh, Victoria thinks, deep and nasally with these soft, quick inhales.

“I can’t help it,” Rachel tells her. “You’re funny.”

And such a weird for Victoria to smile about, wide across her face before she can stop herself, and by the time she’s settled that blooming excitement she doesn’t want to. So she folds her spare towels around her arms. Takes a deep breath.

She turns around.

Rachel’s looking right at her, and her eyeliner has smudged under her eyes, and her undereye concealer has smeared, and whatever tinted moisturizer she has on has since washed off, and she’s so gorgeous that Victoria almost can’t look at her.

In her eyes, she sees a question. She moves forward, answers with her lips on Rachel’s damp cheek, catches Rachel’s mouth when she turns her head to meet her, and she’s so close, breath hot and cold at once in the space between them, pressing the front of her body against Victoria’s.

Rachel guides her to the bed. Victoria clumsily steps back but pauses as the back of her calves meet the mattress, moving her hands off the dip of Rachel’s waist and the curve of Rachel’s jaw to catch herself on her blanket, the towels she just folded.

So Rachel pulls away. Her lips are shining. Her eyes have never been more serious. “Give me a sign,” she says, fast and almost breathless, “and we can do this, or I can stop and leave. Just give me a word, or a look. Anything.”

Victoria swallows hard. And she reaches out, around Rachel, never breaking eye contact. Her fingers meet the hooks of Rachel’s bra. She sees Rachel’s chest heave with a sigh, and she gathers her hands only for them to be replaced by Rachel’s, undoing her bra. She lets it fall down her arms and pulls it the rest of the way. And her breasts are small enough to fit Victoria’s hands, rosy where Victoria’s are brown, but more pressing is the look in her eyes.

Victoria never thought anyone would look at her like that.

Rachel laces her fingers with Victoria’s. Guides her to one of her breasts. And this—

This is something she has always thought about, but the weight of Rachel’s flesh and the heat of her skin and the gentle pulse of her heart when Victoria presses her thumb flat at the center of Rachel’s chest might actually be her own pulse, it’s real, and it’s here, and she’s here.

Victoria has never felt this way before.

**·**

Afterward, when the shower steam has faded away and the towels are in the wash, they lay together under the covers, lights off, the distant glow of streetlamps spilling networks of light across Rachel’s chest, Victoria tucks her body in close with Rachel and lets her eyes close before she hears, “I really like you.”

More than the time they spent catching their breath, sticky with sweat and sated want, Victoria feels self-conscious bordering on embarrassed, breath stuttering.

She waits for Rachel to say something else. To spill truth into this gentle honesty Victoria does not know well. But she doesn’t.

And Victoria chuckles, breathless, not even pulling her lips wide. “You’re cool too, I guess.”

Rachel laughs, all warmth and husky breath, and she rolls over, clasping a leg around Victoria’s hip. Victoria wriggles half-heartedly and lets Rachel kiss her, eases her body toward Rachel’s heartbeat and holds her close, like it means everything not to let go.

**·**


End file.
